Quite frankly, I never expected this will ever come true, especially so soon after the release of Kindle 2. At this point, Kindle 2 is just barely hot off the press, shipping to those early adopters, and already it’s being replaced by a software platform strategy. You have to wonder about Amazon’s claim of Kindle success. For as long as Amazon has tauted Kindle being a hot selling, successful consumer electronic product, the company has been more than reluctant to release any sort of sales figure. During the Kindle shortage throughout the holiday season, Amazon would not divulge any production schedule or data.

Every consumer product company, regardless of industry, understands the important in marketings its own success. McDonald’s with their millions of burgers served, Pepsi with their “4 out of 5 people prefers the taste of Pepsi over Coke”, Apple with their millions of iPhones shipped. Publishing these numbers breeds consumer confidence, and leads to increasing momentum for the popularity of your product. So why isn’t Amazon more forthcoming? Is Kindle really as much of a success as Amazon want the outside world to believe?

Kindle on iPhone's User Interface

To be fair, although Kindle for iPhone is a free app, iPhone itself is a rather expensive device. If you were to compare them purely by the book reading experience, I’m sure more than a few people will prefer the experience of the Kindle hardware rather than just the software alone.

• The e-paper display has a much longer battery life, you don’t have to worry about running out of juice in middle of reading.
• The display is larger and more comfortable than iPhone.
• Backlit LCD screen is more tiring on your eyes over time.

However, iPhone does so much more than the Kindle: You can check email, browse the web, watch videos, download apps, and of course, make phone calls. On top of all that, iPhone actually starts at a lower price range for the base model than Kindle 2. Sure, you have to factor in phone bills as part of that cost of ownership, but those are phone bills that you would probably be paying regardless if you were using the iPhone or any other smartphone/cellular phone devices. From that point of view, Kindle 2 becomes an “unnecessary cost” while iPhone is just another piece of existing cost (cellphones in general) that people can’t live without.

So why would Amazon do this to themselves?

When the Kindle was first released, a lot of people thought that Amazon was aiming to create the same vertical market that Apple had with iPod and iTunes Music Store. The reason Apple was so successful with their strategy, is that they were able to dominate in all fronts of their vertical integration: Hardware, software and content. If Apple had given up that exclusivity at any point and allowed other devices to interact with their software and content, chances are iPod would not be as dominant as they are today.

For Apple, they realized that although content is the “reason” for consumers to purchase iPods, it is the iPod, not the content, that is the primary source of income for Apple. It is increasingly apparent that Amazon’s strategy is very different, they’re in the business of selling content, not hardware. The act of making Kindle available as a software platform on other devices, also makes their own hardware less appealing. It’s not just the iPhone. What if I can get Kindle on my desktop computer, my laptop computer? If you really look at the pricing structure of the Kindle hardware, I can get a Netbook for about or less than the cost of Kindle 2, and I have a fully functional computing device with a full color screen.

Clearly, this is the first step for Amazon to step away from the hardware business. No one knows exactly how much Amazon is paying to subsidize for the cost of not only the hardware itself, but also the wireless service that goes along with the Kindle hardware. If Kindle becomes nothing more than just a software platform, then it’s not much different than MobiPocket, which has been selling eBooks on mobile devices since the year 2000, whom Amazon had also acquired.

The problem with losing this competitive edge, is that without a hardware platform to tie yourself into, you lose the distinction against any upstart that can take over with better value propositions and tools. Perhaps Amazon should’ve learned the lesson from their own MP3 store, which were granted DRM-free music licenses a year before iTunes Music Store. Despite the fact that Amazon had technical advantages with better music file format (higher bitrate and DRM-free), cheaper pricing, they still couldn’t topple iTMS, simply because the synergy of that hardware+software+content platform is too strong to overcome. Amazon MP3 store ended up doing nothing to thwart iTMS sales, although it did manage to pick up and expand its own fan base.

Without the Kindle hardware, Kindle books are just any eBook. If I can get the same eBook that’s better looking or cheaper from any other third party publisher with the same content, I will. Amazon still has the force of being the 500lb. gorilla in the world of book selling, but it just made itself a lot more vunerable if eBook is truly to be the future.

The question is… Will I be motivated enough? Typing on this virtual keyboard is serious business!!

Once you understand the stereotype, establishing relationships within the different cultures within the office is pretty easy. Of course, there will always be someone on the fringe, where personality and ideals clash in such catastrophic way that you’ll never truly get along, even on just a professional level. After all, it’s impossible to love the human race in its entirety. So we learn to get along, or at least learn to ignore those cases of absolute incompatibility.

For the most part, I get along with people just fine. However, if there was one personality that I simply can’t stand in an office environment, it has to be the self-righteous IT admin.

These IT admins usually share the following characteristics:

• They’re usually not the admin for your external servers, such as the customer database, or web server, the internet store… or any outward facing assets.
• Instead, they’re usually the internal admin that manages your desktop, network, storage & email.
• Often times, they’re contracted via a third party consulting/management company. This probably has more to do with very few smaller companies want a full-time IT staff. After all, when nothing is wrong with your corporate network, they just sit there and do nothing.
• They’re usually some very biased zealot championing some company or another. For example, a Microsoft-certified IT admin will endless push MS products & praise Microsoft, after all, their livelihood depends on the continued dominance of Microsoft.
• In contrast, they could also be a super dedicated Linux/Unix geek, where they would transition every system you have to open source as much as possible. They might also insist that every website you build must also be viewable in Lynx.

All those characteristics can probably be interpreted as “charming” or “eccentric” in the same vein as Jon Arbuckle. However, this one last characteristic is what really, really drives me nuts:

• Often times, they’re just complete assholes to anyone who they don’t think have any computer knowledge.

The odds, from the view of most IT admins, are against me, given the fact that I’m a Mac user. Often they will refuse to support me, and then laugh at me for my lack of Windows prowness. The assumption is that since I’m a Mac user, I know nothing about how a computer “really” work and will never understand the greatness and the knowledge that’s being held inside their brain as opposed to mine. Of course, they would have no idea that I once upon time, had a SLI-enabled rig with water pipes directing the flow of heat throughout my self-built system. A computer where every single part and spec, down to the cycling speed of the RAM was carefully researched & picked out by yours truly. I’ve simply grown tired of Windows, and tired of spending thousands of extra money just to get 5 more frames-per-second out of some first-person shooting game that I will get tired of before I’m half-way through the game anyway.

To them, being a “Mac user” pretty much equivocate to being completely computer illiterate. That, in turn, gives them the right to sneer and talk to me in that, “I know you won’t understand this, so let me explain this to you as what I would with a five year-old…” tone.

I don’t find it surprising that they would communicate to me in such a tone. What I do find extremely surprising, is that IT admins are seemingly the only people in the company that can also carry that tone of indignity while talking to VP level staff, CEO’s, and sometimes, even the vaunted Board of Directors! These IT admins, are the only people that can simply tell the VP of (insert any non-technical department here, obviously if you talk to the VP of IT that way, you wouldn’t have a job for much longer) that they don’t know what they’re doing, what they’re talking about, at times infer that they’re extremely dumb for having done something. As for resolutions, they will fix whatever mistake you just made, but not before scolding you and making you feel guilty. Of course, they’ll never fully explain to you what happened, either because they don’t really know, or they think it’s a waste of time to educate that little brain of yours with limited capacity for understanding their technical ingenuity.

The reality is this: IT admins are the new generation mechanics. Simply that, glorified mechanics.

Even VP and CEO’s whimper at the feet of IT admins, because they either do not want to deal with the complexity of computers, or do not have the time to deal with it. If you think about it, a CEO can have ran several multi-million dollar, successful corporations, and still resort to sending the car down to the shop for an oil change. In fact, they would be more likely to simply send everything to the shop than dealing with it themselves. Does the car mechanic talk down to the CEO? Of course not, because they understand that they’re in a service industry, and bad service eventually leads to not having any business down the road.

IT admins don’t see themselves as being a part of the service industry, but rather in a strange way, feels as if they’re in control of something much greater. If the CEO doesn’t get email today, then the whole company is screwed, therefore the wellness of the company relies strictly upon the shoulder of the IT admin, right?

Just as these proud IT admins are talking down to people as if they were five year-olds, the five year-olds are commoditizing what the IT industry does best. We’re approaching an age where a huge majority of our kids growing up knowing how to use a computer. They’re building their own websites, writing codes as a part of school assignments. Just how much longer will the current generation of IT admins be able to snicker at those people who don’t know how to use a computer? As the number of computer illiteracy dwindles, so does the job security of IT administration.

So, word of advice: Stop acting like assholes. There will come a day that they’ll just fire you and hire the sixteen year old from next door to do your job.

Granted, I don’t use a whole lot of Firefox addons, but there is one addon I couldn’t live without: The bookmarking addon from del.icio.us. Since I work on multiple computers at work and home, del.ici.ous has became a valuable tool to keep all of my bookmark in one place. It’s also much more flexible than Google Bookmarks.

Now there is a beta version of the del.icio.us addon for Firefox 3, available here:

delicious blog – Firefox 3, del.icio.us, and you

Just follow the link and install the new version of the addon, so far it’s been working great. With the availability of this addon, my switch over to Firefox 3 is complete.

It’s an old, used, beat-up cliché, but I never thought I would one day consider myself closer to my dad’s category rather than being one of the hip kids that’s ingrained with all of the happenings in the tech world. The fact remains that I’m moving towards being one of the old geezer of the internet. Even though I’m still a notch below thirty, I have been in this tech bubble for nearly a decade.

This realization was made even more clear to me, as I was having a conversation with one of my friend’s friend’s friend, no doubt a connection that’s just enough zip codes apart that I’m likely to run into him at a coffee shop one day, but pretend not to recognize. He was one of the “kids” working at a brand new Web 2.0 start-up, with great aspirations and ideas on creating new software (read: Probably some Facebook/MySpace app), services (read: Odd niche that hasn’t been filled yet) and products (read: … Nevermind, I’ll address this in the following paragraphs).

Somewhere between his passionate speech about how his company is going to do this and that, and how they have this great plan towards building this huge community and thus deriving value, he actually paid half enough of a mind to ask me about what I did. This is where our generational separation came in play: He was absolutely astounded by the amount of money that has to be spent for our company to create, sell, and continue to support a hardware product. There were many statements that sounded like (but not verbatim, since I wasn’t in the mood to take notes about what a college newborn had to dispense) these:

“What is your CPA? Wow, how much? That’s incredible!”
“Wait, how many years of runway do you have to profitability? Really, it takes that long?”
“Wow, you have to maintain inventory? Like, have it stored in a warehouse somewhere?”
“Why would you do this with so much overhead?”
“See, our company’s product is just a service, it doesn’t need warehouse and there’s no overhead!”
“We’ll build a huge user base, and we’ll do it on a super small budget. Just a few servers, that’s it!”
“Oh, profitability? It’s okay, if we build great software, people will use it, and we’ll build value over time!”

What bothered me, is that despite this kid’s college education & apparent (or supposed) brilliance, there seems to be a distinct lack of history & perspective that’s been passed down from our generation to theirs.

Having been through the first internet bubble, a lot of us lived through the harsh reality of what creating a new market, a new industry is really like. The internet bubble was filled with promises, companies with high evaluation and inflated stock prices, all the meanwhile with no real product or real plan towards profitability. Eventually, stock prices normalize, or even just distintegrate completely. Venture capitalist will all want their investment back at some point. Nearly a decade later, we still haven’t figured out how exactly, that we can all profit from this “internet” thing.

The problem, as I see it, is that most of what drives internet’s true economy, is the same things that drives our old economy. For example, Amazon is hardly turning a profit from quarter to quarter (exactly how many quarters they’ve been profitable, I don’t know, but it’s not an amazing amount), but they’re still a sustainable company because they’re basically a traditional retailer in a different medium. EBay is doing very well, because they are basically an online classified/flea market. They are one of the few company, along with maybe Craigslist, that’s figured out a way to be profitable without having to invest huge stakes or store major inventory.

What it boils down to, is that everything we do on the internet, are still extensions of our traditional economy. Instead of going to the drug store, we might be shopping on drugstore.com. Instead of going down to the travel agent’s office, we simply book our flights & hotels online. However the basic product being offered by various internet-based companies hasn’t deviated all that much from tradition.

The web 2.0 companies introduced new concepts of creating user-driven communities, but has any web 2.0 company truly figured out how to monitize anything they’re doing? The methodology behind evaluating web 2.0 company’s worth is almost as ridiculous as the evaluation people used to give to web 1.0 companies. You count up the number of users you have signed up to your service, you give each user on your service some arbitrarily determined value in dollars of how much the “mindshare” of an user on your service is worth. Multiple arbitrary value to registered user base and daily traffic = your company’s value. Of course, this is an oversimplified version of what the actual calculation would entail, but when you have a company that doesn’t create any “real” products, what else is there to evaluate?

So most web 2.0 company’s “real” profitbility plan usually involves one, or both of the following:

1. Serving ads to the user base (Google loves you).
2. Get bought by some other established media entities (News Corp, AOL, MSN… etc…).

See, we really haven’t progressed much beyond what Yahoo and Excite (anyone remember Excite?) was doing nearly a decade ago. We just gave it a different spin, a different face, and a whole new generation of young, hot-blooded college grads willing to do the bidding of whatever VC is haunting their dreams.

No doubt, that web 2.0 is an important progression in the internet economy, but the problem is just as stagnant now as the original internet revolution itself. There are way too many companies that operate on the principle of:

Step 1: Make some software
Step 2: ?????
Step 3: Profit!!!

What bugs me even more, is that these kids seem to have completely forgotten and dismissed the traditional economy that their life is built on. The web 2.0 kids are treating the internet akin to a new age get-rich-quick scheme of sorts, without considering investing their future into a more realistic market. For example, “the kid” was tauting to me about how his company is running a very low overhead, high margin business as he’s holding no real physical product or inventory; I can’t help but wonder, so who is going to be providing “the kid’s” company with real products?

For example, if Dell was to decide that the PC hardware business is too low margin, too high risk and high overhead; if Dell was to abandone the computer market completely and move into just software & services, then who will “the kid” buy hardware from? It’s great that they’re creating brilliant web 2.0 application and all, but what happens if all PC hardware manufacturers decided to move into software, stop making hardware?

If we were to take this a step further, in a end-of-the-world-o-m-g sorta way (which is the mode that I often operate in anyway… it’s not easy being me), what if people who plants our corn & milks our cow decides that they should in fact, move into virtual products & goods as well, because physical products are just too archaic? Does this sound like Second Life gone bad?

The point is, the traditional market will always have its relevance, but almost all wide-eyed kids who just entered the real world are dismissive towards the “old ways of doing things.” They’re far more excited to be working at a web 2.0 company that makes nothing real at all, rather than building a solid consumer product that’s might take years to grow a new category, and spend millions of dollars in marketing. It’s easy to see the few web 2.0 company that’s been lucky enough to be acquired and seeing the owners walking away filthy rich (often still with their company struggling to find a real profitable plan for the future), and think that is the way of the future, a career path.

Consider this: Go see how much money Proctor & Gamble is making every year by selling you Swiffer refills & laundry detergents. It’s not sexy, but it’s a necessity of life.

Say that about Facebook? I still don’t have a Facebook account.

Well, Google released the Android SDK today. The SDK was pretty impressive, giving us a good preview of the the OS user interface (via Engadget). However, one can’t help notice how much the “mockup” looks like a Palm Centro, or any myriad of Palm or Windows Mobile device that’s been available so far. One also can’t help but notice how the UI takes many lessons from iPhone’s UI. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I suppose, but didn’t everyone expect a *lot* more from Google than just another software platform that looks just like any other software platform?

I listen to podcasts when I bike to work every morning (my form of reading the newspaper while having breakfast?), and one of the panelist on TWIT made a lot of sense, although I can’t recall it verbatim (and I’m too lazy to listen through a one-hour long podcast to find the exact quote). Whenever Google can’t conquer a market, they fragment.

Take for example, the “OpenSocial” initiative that Google just started. Google had their own social networking property (www.orkut.com), which was almost completely forgotten as a footnote to all their other services. Facebook became the monstrosity that overtook MySpace, which long before had overtaken Friendster. Orkut, however, was nowhere in anyone’s distant memory. By introducing OpenSocial, Google is undoing Facebook’s dominance in building web applets specifically for their service. In away, it seems like a move that benefits every developer, who can now develop for every social networking site (other than Facebook) and support many “platforms” at once. Of course, the “side” benefit is that Google has planted the seed that could possibly unseat Facebook from its dominance at the top, and also insert themselves as the tour-de-force of any social networking site that may eventually take the throne.

Taking a look at what they’ve done with Android, they’ve essentially fragmented any previous mobile Linux development, again inserted themselves at the helm of the movement. Furthermore, they’ve even fragmented the Java development community as well. CNet’s Crave blog has a great post on this, which touches on some of the issues with Android’s SDK and overall Java development. Of course this isn’t all bad, since Java in itself is a platform that has failed to satisfy anyone. However, once again it shows Google as a very shrewd company at being able to project themselves as a kind, gentle company that can do no evil; and at the same time, position themselves as the titan that is able to undermine an entire industry in one fell swoop.

Who does that sound like? You know it, it’s on the tip of your tongue, you know exactly who I’m talking about.

Yup, Apple.

It was another day of soul-searching later, that I said to myself, “Wait, is that all there is to this news? That’s it? Really? You mean, I didn’t miss anything? I mean.. I combed through my RSS reader for hours and hours looking for more detailed information, something more exciting, something with actual substance…. and… really? That’s it?” For at least a few hours, I thought I was caught in some sort of temporal anomaly and was missing vital information that Google has apparently announced to the entire world minus little ol’ me.

The truth is rather, disappointing? Underwhelming? Indeed, the news outlets were positive on Day 1, and almost all universally speculative and introspective on Day 2. How many times have we been promised a “mobile phone OS based on Linux & open-source”? This harkens back to the Linux PDA days, and we all know how that went. The only difference between Google’s announcement and all the other dozen open-source mobile OS initiative, is that Google has a lot of money. Shitloads of money. Certainly a lot more money than open source Linux companies that’s been trying to figure out how to make any money at all by doing, anything and everything?

Of course you’ll see an impressive list of partners, it’s Google for god’s sake! Everyone jump in the pool! The question is, how many of those partners really have any product development plans? How many of those partners will be looking for their own competitive advantage once the SDK is out? How many of those partners will actually, actively contribute to the initiative once they realized that they are at very high risk to put themselves out of business?

The answer for now is, “It’s Google, they’ll make it work.” We’ll see what develops in the coming months. I see it as Google just throwing a piece of SDK out there, and allowing the sharks to battle it out for supremacy. After all, taking this strategy really means they have very little stake in any particular company. It’s a smart way to position themselves, as a software platform provider that doesn’t really care which hardware wins out. If Sony Ericsson develops something great and put HTC out of business, so be it. If Nokia collapse (well, they haven’t made a commitment to the consortium at all yet, probably a smart move at this point for them), it really doesn’t matter to Google either.

I’m starting to see a bunch of executives & software engineers from companies gather at a coliseum built in Google’s backyard (or maybe by naval airbase or something), and someone from Google is sitting atop in the Emperor’s seat and just giggling at the bloodshed that’s about to happen.

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the way that Google is going about this. In fact, it’s probably the smartest thing they could do to get into the mobile device arena without actually becoming involved in it. The style just disagrees with me on a personal level. I like companies that design end-to-end solutions that satisfies consumer needs. For example, Tivo is a great company that threw themselves into the heat of the battle, and forever changed the way we interact with televisions.

That kind of a company earns my respect. Google’s Open Handset initiative makes me wonder, “Is this just going to be a Linux version of Windows Mobile?”

So I was a little disappointed when NBC decided to have a bit spat with iTunes, and decided to pull all of their shows off of iTunes by the end of the year. What really gets to me, is how senseless the arguments the media companies are raising against Apple. This doesn’t pertain to just NBC, but all media companies dealing with iTunes as a whole.

Think back to when Universal was negotiating with Apple for their new music agreement. Their argument was that they’re not making enough money from iTunes Music Store, they want more control over pricing. Similar arguments has been brought up over the years with Apple multiple times, and they’re all along the lines of more control over DRM, more control over pricing, more profit for the record labels. Time and time again they insist that they can’t make enough money from iTunes Music Store alone.

Yet, look what happened these past few months. EMI started selling DRM-free tracks on iTunes, and doesn’t seem to be hurt by it as much as bolstered by it. All the other studios started offering completely DRM-free tracks on Amazon MP3 that sold for as little as $0.89 per track, depending on albums (although the misconception is all tracks are available at $0.89, they are not. Most out-of-print album tracks are $0.99, similar to how such albums costs more than new releases at record stores). They have agreed to sell less restrictive & less expensive music on Amazon, meanwhile telling Apple this is precisely what they cannot ever afford to do.

Now with this NBC deal, they’re complaining about revenue, about not making enough money. Same arguments as the record labels had with iTunes. At the same time, they’re going to be bringing out their own video service that allows you to watch entire shows for free (albeit with advertisements) and even embed videos on other sites in a very web 2.0-friendly fashion. So now they’re just serving up bandwidth and going back to relying on advertisement-based revenue models. Do they really make that much more money from webcasts compared to selling the shows? I’m sure the studios makes a huge amount of money from DVD sales of TV shows. Meanwhile iTunes’ sheer volume may not be as much as DVD sales now, it is a developing market that will probably grow bigger over time as we steer away from solid-state mediums for media delivery.

Furthermore, NBC’s little tirade about how much they’ve helped the iPod, and how they should get a share of that iPod sales revenue, is utterly ridiculous. Has RCA, Sony, Sharp and other TV manufacturers been sending part of their revenue to television stations? Obviously TV as a delivery medium wouldn’t work without the TV stations. So why isn’t NBC charging TV makers a fee for delivering their shows to millions of homes everyday?

We’ll see how this whole thing plays out. In the end, AmazonMP3 might take over iTunes Music Store, but that’s only because iTMS was there to pave the way first. Maybe Hulu.com will succeed, or maybe it’ll be a massive failure. Whatever happens, the end result probably wouldn’t impact iPod sales a slight bit. After all, no one’s stopped buying TV’s because NBC doesn’t have any interesting shows on Wednesday nights, right?

Here I think of all the announcements:

1. iPod Shuffle – Practically nothing new and worth mentioning at all.
2. iPod Nano – It’s FAT. I really don’t like the new look. Although I bet once I’ve held on in person, I’d be willing to put up with the new form factor. It is even slimmer and overall smaller than the current Nanos. The proportion of the click wheel to the width of the device is just… ugly. I wish they could’ve worked a little harder and done something else. I was really hoping for an iPod Nano-Touch type of device here. It’s still not a bad iPod, just underwhelming.
3. iPod Classic – Same ol’ same ol’ with bigger hard drive. I do find it funny that the iPod Classic’s hard drive is bigger than some of my friend’s computer hard drive. Nothing new, nothing exciting.
4. iPod Touch – Great device, but it’s not really that fresh since it’s just a stripped down iPhone. Like I said, I rather wished they would integrate Nano + Touch into some device that’s in between.

I’m sure Apple will still sell a ton of them, because no other MP3 player in the market has near the media dominance. The surprise to me was the $200 price drop on the iPhone. I promptly went out and got one, 2-year contract be damned. At $399 it’s a very reasonably priced PDA phone, in fact, one of the most feature-rich and well priced phone you can get. I guess I’ll put up with AT&T for another 2 years at least.

Wireless iTunes Music Store… In a way it’s a long time coming, but I wonder how many times I’ll be wondering around in middle of nowhere just wanting to buy a new song?

Although I wouldn’t go so far as saying everything was “crappy”… I wasn’t extremely impressed either.

Despite of how much I love the iPhone, I still don’t believe in signing  a two year contract for AT&T/Cingular. I’ve been a customer with Cingular back since when they were PacBell PCS, I have no reason to be locked down to a contract to prove my loyalty to a carrier. Especially since the iPhone isn’t subsidized at all. If signing a contract meant I can save a few hundred dollars, then at least the value proposition is existent. There is absolutely no reason to a sign a contract for a phone that will inevitably be unlocked (and probably be available at the same price).

Service issues aside, the iPhone itself is simply one of the most brilliant consumer product ever made. It is a device that will completely reshape the mobile phone market. The problem is, the other phone manufacturers seem to be thinking, “Wow, the iPhone has a touchscreen, we must all move to touchscreen-only phones as well.” I’m not saying that iPhone’s touchscreen isn’t brilliant, but it isn’t the end-all solution to the woes of the mobile phone design we’ve seen in the past decade.

There are already several manufacturers that’s decided to manufacture their own versions of a touchscreen phone. Some of which has been offering touchscreen capability for years (for example, most of HTC’s Windows Mobile based phones). The problem with these phones isn’t whether or not your buttons are placed on a screen or engraved into a rubber nub, the problem is the underlying unresponsive, inadequate, and sometimes down-right ugly software.

It’s easy to credit an obvious invention (even though touchscreen has always been around, the type that iPhone uses, basically a type of clear laptop touchpad, is completely new to the market) for the success of a hardware product; ultimately it isn’t just the hardware design, but how the hardware design interact, melds and works with the underlying software. I don’t find the buttons on my Razr hard to press, I don’t find the features on my HTC Windows Mobile phone to be so hard to access or inadequate; but I also don’t understand why everything I do on either of these phones seems to take place 3 seconds after I’ve executed a command, clicked a button, or even just scrolling through the address book.

Years and years ago, there was this great, ambitious operating system called BeOS. It was built from the ground up to be a multi-threaded, multi-CPU operating system. The most impressive aspect of BeOS, was how responsive it was at handling tasks that were extremely taxing to other operating system at the time. You can run multiple windows of videos, move them around the screen, resize them and still have lightning fast response. Mind you, this was the age when most users were still living with Windows 3.1 (maybe some on Windows 95?). The software engineers of BeOS were able to achieve this, because they were very aware that the outward responsiveness of an OS is just as important to its interaction with the user as the underlying operations.

For example, while another OS will prioritize the task of writing files to the disk, BeOS prioritized the playback of that file being written, saved, copied. The writing of the file can still be finished up in the background, but the immediate feedback of that file being worked on is the most important thing to the user, and delivered a level of interactivity that was far more appreciable.  The OS was instantaneously more robust because it made sure that you knew what it is doing, what you’ve done, then went ahead and finished up all those tasks in the background where it wouldn’t bother you.

That is in essence one of the most important aspect about the iPhone. On the first week of iPhone’s release, CNet even performed a real-life, side-by-side test of iPhone’s UI speed against what Apple were showing in the commercial. There were all sorts of accusation that Apple had fussed with the footage, sped up some parts, edited out the lag time in between. Well, the CNet guys found that almost second by second, they can do everything that was done in the commercial with their iPhone. Sure, the touchscreen UI is slick and intuitive, but it is also the amazing responsiveness of the UI, the underlying robustness of the software, that really sets the iPhone apart from any phone that you’ve ever used before.

Another company named Pasen put out this video on Youtube recently:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Sure, it’s a touchscreen device that completely rips off the iPhone. Look at the video, watch the number of times you had to click, double-click, drag fingers around, try to see if the device is responding. Wait, what is it doing now? Did I just select that? Is that playing now? How do I.. wait, let me click on that again.

I hope the rest of the consumer electronics industry doesn’t follow suit. It’s not just about the touchscreen.

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Enjoy!

Finally, on the last day of May, iTunes has been updated to version 7.2 along with the arrival of “iTunes Plus”. DRM-less, 256kbps AAC files at last. I was excited enough to hop on right away and purchase 2 albums that has been sitting in my Amazon shopping cart for months (in their CD form, no less).

I’ve always been a very discerning audiophile, which only recently finally succumbed to the fact that keeping all of my music in Apple Lossless is really just a waste of hard drive space for a small (although still perceivable) quality gain. I have over thousands of dollars invested in pretty good audio equipments, most of which I no longer listen to on even a monthly basis anymore.

My Super Audio CD player is completely useless, as the format has died a painful and slow death. Now it is nothing more than a glorified CD changer that I never, ever bother to change. I have racks of CD’s that I don’t really want to deal with on my next move, only half of which has been ripped into MP3′s.

Fact of the matter is, there are only so many hours of entertainment I can relegate to my schedule per day, and most of those times are split in between games, TV, and other activities outside of the house. My interaction with music now are limited to my commute and a few minutes at work when I don’t have to worry about the next meeting. I am now content with 256kbps

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The whole fiasco is summarized at TechCrunch, with the users eventually winning out at the end. Obviously, there was no way that Digg can fight back against their entire user community. It’s a demonstration of how powerful the public voice can be, especially given the proper medium.

The question here, is that if a decryption key can be made into such highly publicized information, then what is the boundary for any information to remain private? Traditionally these type of information are always available, but only through backdoor channels, you always had to “know somebody that knew somebody” and digg around (no pun intended) for these ever-elusive hack. Now a HD-DVD decryption key is out in the wild, what’s a software maker’s right to protect say… their serial numbers?

If everyone posted their Windows Vista serial key, for example, what is Microsoft’s right to protect themselves against a possible outbreak of millions of serial keys being made public, and the ensuing windows activation nightmare?

Personally, I think the delay doesn’t really mean much. As much as I love to see a new OS from Apple, there’s nothing obviously wrong and needs to be improved in MacOS X now. Unless Leopard has some insane, awesome unknown trick up its sleeve, there aren’t any feature that I have to have now. There certainly weren’t any new features introduced by Vista that makes me say, “I wish MacOS had this…”

Getting iPhone out on-time, and without bugs is probably the most important issue to Apple’s continued success at the moment. A bad iPhone launch could set back years of good will that Apple has built up. It’s funny how much it takes to rebuild a company (dating back to Steve Job’s return and the cute multi-color iMacs), and how easy it is to destroy it and see it crumple (the entire 1990′s for Apple).

For the most part, my switch to WordPress almost represents a step backwards. Hosting my own blog, running it on a local database rather than one that will potentially last forever somewhere in Google’s massive server farm. Customizing my own templates, throwing in Plugins to coax WordPress into what I want it to do. In fact, WordPress doesn’t have any official support for tagging, and still relies on a somewhat antiquated category system to deal with post organization.

So why switch to WordPress now? I wish I had a better reason to justify it, perhaps it was just my urge to be able to tinker more than I could with Blogger, perhaps it was the notion of having complete control; maybe it’s even the possibility of implementing WordPress on more sites, where the owner doesn’t feel particularly comfortable with giving everything up to Google.

Whatever it is… I’m happy with the move, until next time, that is.

Meanwhile, here are some tips to getting WordPress up and running:

• Install Sidebar Widgets:
  This addon will give you the ability to widgetize your sidebar. It’ll make the various sidebar components much easier to manage than editing the files directly.
• Inline Ajax Page:
  This is the plugin I use to automatically truncate posts, and be able to expand them on the fly. I like this much more than WordPress’s built-in method to split post. This is also closer to what I used to do on my Blogger page. Expanding post on the same page for reading has always been more appealing to me than linking to subpages.
• Most importantly… Simple Tagging:
  There are a couple of plugins that’ll extend WordPress to work with tags. This is one I picked over the other, for its combination of flexibility and simplicity.

Let’s see how long I stick with WordPress before I get crazy and install something else

However, for every created need, there are a dozen of “WTF were you thinking?” I think this qualifies as one of them:

iCarta: Stereo Dock for iPod® with Bath Tissue Holder

I realize the product is a bit on the old side. I ran across a picture while browsing TUAW, and couldn’t resist posting it here. Since the product has been released for almost a year now, I’d like to see how many of these they’ve actually sold.

Brute force keygen cracks open Vista

It’s certainly not an easy hack, but at the end of the day is that it *will* work. Microsoft will probably also attempt to figure which keys are hacked and which ones aren’t, and disable those which are. The problem is, if hacked keys become widespread and varied enough, it will become harder and harder to track & keep everything “clean”. If two people calls up the Windows Activation hotline, who do you trust?

“Show Us The Code” is pushing for Steve Ballmer to show the open source world exactly what part of Microsoft’s source code is being used in Linux:

Your repeated claims that Linux violates Microsoft’s intellectual property has come to the attention of the Linux community. Not only that, but it’s been reported Microsoft has convinced businesses to pay for a Linux patent that you can’t provide.

Publicly pledge your support for Microsoft showing the public the code within Linux that violates their intellectual property by May 1st, 2007.

So far, the support seems to be gathering steam. Let’s hope this one doesn’t fizzle out like previous movements.

The Original Apple Vs. PC Guy Ad

Viacom to Sign Deal with Joost (via Techcrunch)

Hackers discover HD DVD and Blu-ray “processing key” — all HD titles now exposed

Enjoy!

Vista Month: Welcome To The DRM?

It’s a good, short & concise post that pretty much summarizes all the ideas behind Vista’s new content protection scheme without going into too much details. Although the post itself is relative old news by now (not to say that my post isn’t), the comments following the post is most entertaining.

There are quite a few people who swear they’ll never use Vista. Which will most likely be challenged when they purchase their next machine which will inevitably ship with Vista preinstalled. A few said they would rather switch to Linux, and even fewer said they will switch to MacOS. Completely understandable, since you can get Linux distributions for free, and you would have to pay for a new machine to get MacOS.

The number of people who are willing to defend Microsoft on this point is also surprising. While a few valid counter arguments has been made, including that most of these security features are turned on/off depending on the policy of the content provider; the fact remains that the studio has absolute, revocable control over what we paid for.

As history has shown us, it’s really hard to disable or extend pre-existing devices of any sort. For example, add-on drives to enable extra functions in consoles has never really panned out (even XBox 360′s HD-DVD drive is nothing more than offering an value add to watch HD-DVD content. No games will ever come out in that format). Destroying backward compatibility, as some early CD-DRM methods has proven, is also nearly impossible. With all the non-compliant stand-alone HD players out there, it’s hard to say if the studios will ever enforce complete security profiles on HD content.

However, this isn’t about the practical application of such ideals, but the fact that our rights to some degree has been completely taken away by these implementation of technology. If we allow them to get away with it this round, they will make sure it was implemented the “right way” the next time around. That’s an argument that everyone seems to be missing.

CES 2007: The Wootable Awards

Part of me didn’t believe that even Microsoft would go as far as implementing a content protection system that would come at a such detriment to the consumer. So I waited for weeks to see if Microsoft had any sort of public statement and rebuttal against it. Microsoft did eventually comment on the content protection behind Vista, and really couldn’t say much more other than admitting, and putting a good spin on what has been done.

Short blurb about AACS
To understand Windows Vista content protection, we have to first understand the difference between DVD, Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Our good ol’ DVD format was made during the adolescence of the digital content era. At the time the movie studios were promised that this complex encryption algorithm would never be cracked. As it turns out, CSS (the method of encryption used on DVD) wasn’t as impervious as we thought. If I recall correctly, the key to decrypting CSS was discovered in one of the software that plays back DVD on the PC. Since there’s no way to revoke that key once discovered, CSS encryption was hence cracked forever.

Thus, with HD-DVD and Blu-ray, the studios sought out a much more effective method of protecting their content. What they arrived at is what’s known as AACS (Advanced Access Content System). The key differences between AACS and CSS are:

• AACS seems to have a more modern public/private key encryption system, where there are many more keys assigned than there are in CSS encryption. The granularity of key distribution is unknown. Keys can be handed out on a per-player or per-model number basis, or perhaps even a per-company basis. This is unknown.What is for sure, is that there is a very complex & established backend that manages the distribution & licensing of all these keys.
• AACS uses a revocable broadcast system, where the content providers can revoke keys that has been hacked & distributed illegally. So if they realize a certain key has been compromised, they could distribute future content where they no longer will play and decrypt by using that pirated key.
• Manufacturers of players, either software or hardware based, has to pay licensing fee to AACS in order to use the keys. If a certain manufacturer say, goes out of business and then fails to pay the licensing fee, there are no guarantee that your player from that said manufacturer will continue to function. They could revoke the key and you would essentially be stuck with a brick (or useless bytes on your hard drive, if it’s a software player).
• AACS is also “policy-based”. Meaning that each Blu-ray and HD-DVD has a list of configurable policy to act with the hardware/software system that it is playing on. The content provider can choose to enable & disable certain features. For example, a lot of first-generation players shipped with component output which does not support HDCP (the end-to-end encryption from your player to your TV set), and a lot of current content does not have the policy to disable or degrade playback at the lack of HDCP. However content providers can choose to enable this feature in the future and once again, render your current hardware/software potentially useless.

How doe this affect Windows Vista?
Microsoft has an obvious strategy on making Windows Vista the next “media center” for every home, which probably also led to the decision for them to comply with just about everything that content providers wanted, even above and beyond the normal amount of compliance that is expected from a hardware manufacturer of traditional players.

AACS on its own is much more resource intensive; which explains why very early first generation Blu-ray and HD-DVD players can take as long as a minute to just “load” the disc. Of course that has improved with better & cheaper processors in the players, and won’t be much of an issue on your PC. Other than this resource being taken up by decryption, there are still other issues.

Like the aforementioned flexible policy with AACS, Windows Vista is also designed to “degrade” video & sound playback quality if the policy of the content calls for it. Of course all players has to deal with this, but PC users has the worst of it, because there’s a severe lack of completely compliant hardware available. To have complete compliance with AACS, you need to have HDCP, the end-to-end data encryption protection from the disc all the way to your monitor/speakers. There are very few hardware available that has HDCP compliance. There are very few HDCP compliant video cards, I’m not aware of any HDCP compliant sound card at all (which means you can’t get a digital output, only analog), and there are next to none HDCP compliant computer monitor on the market.

Furthermore, complete HDCP compliance requires part of the video/sound driver to become a “black box”. Obviously if the driver source code is available completely, HDCP would be easily hacked or bypassed by some method. So those users who chooses to run alternative operating systems, such as Linux, may be completely out of luck when it comes to HD content on their computer. There would be no open-source driver development to support HDCP components.

However, like I said earlier, most content available now do not have the entire set of compliance rules enabled, simply because there are still plenty of HD components on the market that doesn’t have compliance, and will *never* be compliant. It’s hard to say whether the content provider will eventually enable these features, and essentially shut out all first generation HD adopters (players & TV without HDCP support are all going to be obsolete if they choose to do so). It remains a fact that they are the ones in control, the consumers are not.

Other than HDCP compliance checks, Microsoft also implemented a “tilt-bit”. This is where they go much further to ensure content provider’s happiness than even the stand-alone players. A “tilt-bit” is a term derived from pinball machines, where there’s a detection that if you tilt the machine too much, the machine would consider that you were cheating & stop your ability to continue play. There is a constant system check that runs in the background every 30ms (milliseconds) when you are playing HD content. It checks against all the drivers in the system, all the processes, to make sure that nothing “weird” is going on. Nothing out of “expectation” is going on.

The reality is that computers are rather fickle machines. When you have millions of microscopic circuits on a tiny little chip smaller than your nails, there are a lot of errors that happens on a very small scale at all times. Computer chip do deteriorate over time as well, resulting very small breakdowns in circuits. Most people don’t realize that their computer is very much like their car, where “wear & tear” over time eventually degrades performance and kills a computer (which answers a lot of the questions like, “Why did my computer break down? I’ve only had it for 5 years and only ran one software on it!”). A “tilt-bit” check essentially catches errors similar to what your computer will naturally produce, and then decides what is deemed “appropriate” and what might be “hostile” and then restarts your graphic subsystem if it detects any potentially “harmful” behavior.

This is done to ensure that there isn’t any memory resident hack that’s capturing the decrypted output somehow. It’s also a very wide-area check for any potential hack of any sort that the system just can’t even predict or even know about. It’s like catching brim shrimps with a fishnet.

Lastly, there is a 128-bit encryption for all data sent through the PCI bus to your video card during playback, to ensure that no one can use any sort of a hardware snoop to capture unencrypted data going from the disc to your video card. HD content already takes up much higher bandwidth than DVD, now imagine having to encrypt/decrypt that content over PCI bus in real time. That’s an incredible amount of resource being eaten up for no reason other to service the content providers.

Will other OS’s follow suit?
This kind of insanely taxing implementations of content protection, is what I believe to be the reason that we have yet to see any sort of next-gen content announcement from Apple.

As much as people criticize Apple’s FairPlay DRM for being a closed & proprietary system, people also forget how much Apple fought to reach the compromise that became FairPlay. FairPlay came at a time where record companies weren’t happy about distributing digital content, and even those who did, did not want to license more than one device at a time. They wanted to charge people money for every device that their music played on. Apple fought back, got the contract so people can play their music on up to 5 devices, and are able to disable licensing on devices that they no longer use.

Even before the iTunes Music Store (I’m also surprised at how many people forgot that iTunes existed without the music store at first, and the first iPods did not have downloadable content; it was just a MP3 player), iPod implemented a really screwy one-direction music download to the device, where the song names would be completely scrambled & referenced by a XML file to provide a “soft-protection”. This was part of the design that convinced the music industry that Apple were at least somewhat reasonable to work with. Apple didn’t do these things for no reason at all, they did it so they can negotiate some sort of a compromise that could appease both content provider and the consumers.

Microsoft had made absolutely no attempt at negotiating for a compromise of any sort. Even with their Zune player, they agreed to “pay” music labels for each Zune they sold, even if none of that label’s music would ever make it onto a Zune. Microsoft has certainly made a terrible example of how to deliver content protection to their consumer, and I hope other companies will not follow in their footsteps.

1. You’re only being compared to the same product of last generation.
This type of comparative review where you’re evaluated mostly against the last generation, perhaps even last generation of your own product, can only happen under two situations. One, if you’re the market leader and there are nothing else to compare to. Or two, you are only impressive when compared against last generation or your previous self. If you’re not in situation one, you’re in trouble.

2. Even major publications that are generally very mutual and stays away from making strong statements and opinions are not giving you a positive, perhaps even just mutual review.
This would be CNET…

It’s very clear in CNET’s review of Windows Vista Ultimate, they are not impressed by how much Windows Vista had to offer after years of development, and the only comparison that would shine light on Vista’s major facelift, would be against its former brethen.

Snippets like this cannot be what Microsoft has planned for five+ years:

Windows Vista is not the Apple Mac OS X 10.4 killer one hoped for (or feared).

Perhaps we’re spoiled, but after more than five years of development, there’s a definite “Is that all?” feeling about Windows Vista. Like cramming an info-dump into a book report the night before it’s due, there certainly are a lot of individual features within the operating system, but the real value lies in their execution–how the user experiences (or doesn’t experience) these–and like the info-dump, we came away shaking our heads, disappointed. Compared with Mac OS X 10.4, Windows Vista feels clunky and not very intuitive, almost as though it’s still based on DOS (or at least the internal logic that made up DOS).

But is Windows Vista a bad operating system? No. It’s just a disappointment for PC users who hoped that Microsoft would deliver something truly exciting to finally leapfrog ahead of Apple. They failed.

Of course, CNET is still putting a positive spin on this being just Vista 1.0, and Microsoft will publish service packs in the future to improve the user experience. Although there are absolutely no historical example of that Microsoft, who up until this point used Service Packs primarily to fix bugs and address security issues.

Even then, they did not recommend current XP users to jump on the Vista bandwagon.

Windows Vista is essentially warmed-over Windows XP. If you’re currently happy with Windows XP SP2, we see no compelling reason to upgrade. On the other hand, if you need a new computer right now, Windows Vista is stable enough for everyday use.

The saddest truth about all this though, is that eventually all users will be running Vista, because it’ll be on their computer when they buy it. Chances are it’ll be the cheap crappy version of Vista anyway, but it’ll be Vista nevertheless. Microsoft will still make plenty of money just by the inertia of the computing masses, with a mediocre OS that did nothing to take us forward. At least Windows users can finally say they have a 3D accelerated UI as well, albeit an ugly looking one (insert your “PC case with plexi window + neon light” versus Mac Pro design analogy here).

From The Unofficial Apple Weblog:
MIT writer says Vista drove her to Mac

And the original article here:
Uninspiring Vista

Yay! I’m not alone! We should start a whole new subculture of “users driven to Mac by Vista” under the broader big-brother branch of the Mac culture.

Worth a read:
The Presto Service and HP Printing Mailbox Review – Part Two

The iPhone breaks two basic axioms of consumer technology. One, when you take an application and put it on a phone, that application must be reduced to a crippled and annoying version of itself. Two, when you take two devices—such as an iPod and a phone—and squish them into one, both devices must necessarily become lamer versions of themselves. The iPhone is a phone, an iPod, and a mini-Internet computer all at once, and contrary to Newton—who knew a thing or two about apples—they all occupy the same space at the same time, but without taking a hit in performance. In a way iPhone is the wrong name for it. It’s a handheld computing platform that just happens to contain a phone.

Read the whole article here.

Well, I hope CES learned their lesson and never do this again. Apple just blew everyone away with the iPhone, coverages are all over the web, so I won’t repeat any of them here. I’ll just provide a few useful links to read up on all the jazz:

News.com
Engadget
Gizmodo

Of course, not the least:

Apple

Despite month of speculations, including many accurate ones, Apple *still* managed to just BLOW EVERYONE AWAY. Even with all the expectations and hype, they outdone all of them. No one cares about anything that’s going on at CES now, we’re all just counting our bills and waiting ’til June 2007.

What is exciting to me, is that Jason Mraz released his EP not in iTunes, not in WMA format with DRM, and most certainly not on the Zune marketplace (that wouldn’t have done him any good at all, would it?); but in pure, unadulterated MP3 file format. The audiophile in me still despises MP3 for what it is, a lossy compression format where some of the most important and delicate detail in the music gets freeze dried, but it is by far more preferable than any other DRM-laden formats.

Similarly, Ropeadope has announced that they’re going to all digital distribution of their records starting this year; and early indication is that they will be distributing via MP3′s, sans all the DRM-goodness that major record label deem as their sacred family jewel.

It is also worthy to mention that some big artists that has less need for major label backing, such as Phish, has been publishing their own music on the web for years now. Phish goes one step further in distributing not only MP3′s, but uncompressed versions of their live tours.

More and more, record labels are exposed as promotional vehicles of bland and uninspired music rather than scouts of original & exotic talent. Several years ago Apple had the chance to revolutionize the music industry by allowing artists to directly publish music via iTunes Music Store. Instead they went the safe route and established a storefront for a pre-existing, but archaic economy. It certainly doesn’t help that Microsoft essentially sanctioned treating people like thieves by giving record labels royalty on every Zune player sold (which isn’t all that many, I wonder if they have to provide royalty on the players they give away?).

People love the artists, everyone hates the record label. The record industry has a chance here to gain a huge amount of traction with the public by allowing people the freedom to do what they want with their music. Remove DRM, and suddenly the record industry improves its image by a huge amount, and maybe that plunging music sale would surge back up again. Keep going down the DRM route, eventually all good artists will start publishing their own music, on their own terms.

Vaporware ’06: Return of the King

Vista Security Flaws Uncovered

That, in combination with how hackers already found a way to fool Vista into a permanent 30-day trial. Does not bode well for Microsoft’s PR. Of course, all operating system has its share of security flaws, MacOS X has plenty as well. Just that Microsoft is always under more scrutiny than anyone else. It’s the price you pay for being a dominant, yet also hated company at the same time.

Walt Mossberg’s review on Wall Street Journal
(sorry, subscription required for this one)

Presto on CBS’s Early Show

Presto on CBS’s local San Diego station

San Jose Mercury News

A very detailed out of the box experience via Gear Diary

As much as I adore Paul Thurrot (and that’s no sarcasm, I really do admire how much time & effort he put into giving us accurate & detailed information), I can’t help but note the enthusiasm and appreciation he has towards one of the “most important Windows release in years.” I mean, if you only release one major OS revision ever fives years, are there anything less important? However the review eschews every possible comparison to other existing operating system and turns a blind eye towards the alternatives. There’s much to be said about judging an OS release on its own merit, but the whole mega-multi-part review just reminds me of how much Windows Vista is just playing catch-up.

The most apparent example of this, is the 3d-accelerated UI of Vista. The Aero/Glass (I’m still not sure exactly how it’s branded, Aero Glass, Glass Aero? Aero, then Glass? *shrug*) interface in itself is close to being unusable. For those of you who has not seen it yet, there are basically translucent UI element all throughout the operating system. The windows in background are blurred through the translucent elements, thus giving you the frosted “glass” effect for which the UI is named after. Problem is, having multiple windows stacked this way causes visual confusion and provides no improvement to productivity. Transparency in Windows has been done before via third party addons, although not accelerated by hardware, and from an usability stand point has never worked well.

So if the interface is so bad, why did Microsoft put it in? It’s the same reason why people mod their computer cases, cut out windows on the side and put in a bunch of neon lights. Anyone who thinks a bunch of tied down cables and liquid cooling tubes lit by a dozen LED and neon light is “cool” clearly has no appreciation for aesthetics and design. At some point Microsoft thought that’s the user base that they had to impress.

Flip3D is equally atrocious as a task-switcher. It’s Microsoft’s attempt to make something that resembles Expose, without just copying it completely. Expose on the Mac instantly zooms out all of the windows you have open, allowing you to look through the windows and find the application that you are working with. Flip3D, places the windows at a diagonal view that detracts from readability. Furthermore, it stacks the windows up, so a single view of all your open windows isn’t really possible. At the end of the day, it is no more effective the good ol’ alt+tab. What I found most offensive, is that for all the 3d accelerated power, the windows aren’t even anti-aliased, giving you an ugly jagged edge as it is repositioned into an isometric/diagonal viewing angle.

Interface aside, the underlying security improvements of Windows is nothing more than just catching up to Unix, the underpinning of MacOS X. The one thing that would’ve taken Vista past OS X, instead of just playing catch up, was the ambitious database-driven file system. So ambitious in fact, that WinFS was axed years before the final development cycle. Who knows when we’ll get WinFS? Another five years? Would WinFS still be relevant?

What about the bundled software? Vista finally has a built-in Calendar without people having to shell out money for their own PIM or Outlook. It also now has separate applications that handles photos and other media, instead of dealing with those media organization strictly from Explorer (not IE, but Windows Explorer) as it was in Windows XP. Basically, Microsoft just copied iCal, iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD. Way to go Microsoft.

The last item that I’ve found extremely disappointing, is that Windows Vista is supposed to be the version of Windows that finally allows us to take advantage of the 64-bit processor now found in most PC’s. It seems silly that all of our AMD Athlon and Intel Core chips has had 64-bit extension for more than a year now, and still yet to be able to take full advantage of it. However, Vista 32-bit and 64-bit are actually different installs. So if you install 32-bit Vista, you’ll have to reinstall completely if you want to use 64-bit. If you install 64-bit today, you’ll probably find software or device driver conflicts as they weren’t written for the 64-bit Vista.

MacOS X, btw, is 64-bit (even though I think few apps are written to take advantage of that yet), and has been for almost an entire year now. No separate installs, no separate drivers. It just works.

Vista will do just fine, because people with PC will eventually upgrade, new PC’s will ship with it, corporations will adopt. However, it is nevertheless a disappointing and underwhelming release. Anyone who sees through that will heavily consider switching to a Mac, just as I have.

IE 7 optimized for Google

I’m conflicted, cheer or jeer?

“The process involves shooting two different wavelengths of light onto the recording surface. The use of two lasers creates a very specific image that is sharper than what current techniques can render. Depending on the color (wavelength) of the light, information is written onto a disk. The information is highly compacted, so the disk isn’t much thicker. It’s like a typical DVD.”

But.. all is not good news.. how long before we’ll actually see this technology?

“But when will we able to use DVDs with a terabyte capacity? Not before several years. In fact, the researchers just received a $270,000, three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to continue its work.”

Yeah.. it’ll be a while.

Read the whole story here.