Infinity and Beyond

Good time at a party last moth?  Perhaps it was a great time even?  And perhaps now you’ve got some…residual issues?  And perhaps you’re embarrassed and don’t want to call up and say, “Um, so hey!  I may have left you drunk on the couch that night, but my syphilis may still be with you!”  So what are you to do?

Thank you The Internets for coming to the rescue once again!  This is one of those great things like inmate greeting cards which really lets The Internets shine (or the Google news bar for all the zany articles!).  Instead of making that awkward phone call, just send them an anonymous STD email.  inSpot.org is a site dedicated to allowing you to do just that.  They’ve got rather plain to rather spicy versions of the messages.  I’m not really sure what the best approach is–sending the sterile doctor’s office version or the half-naked man in a towel…but hey you’ve got options!

Further empowering the receiver, if you’re in one of a number of cities supported by the site you can be linked directly to information on where and how to get tested.  Apparently some health clinics would do the calling for you, but this online method not only allows the sender to still remain anonymous, but frees up health workers to be doing other things.

Of course, if everyone outside of real America would just practice abstinence until marriage, which works, clearly, the world wouldn’t need a tool such as this.  But until that day, just know there are resources out there to help!

Here’s my great idea: the anonymous Twitter STD stream–make a new account, add all your hookups, then tweet about your infected meat.

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RealNetworks has suspended selling the RealDVD software after Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of U.S. District Court in San Francisco temporarily barred the company from selling it. RealDVD is a program that allows users to copy DVDs onto the hard drives of their computers. The software has only been on sale for about a week and on the same day the product launched the legal fight began. In all, six major studios are suing the Seattle based company. This is not the first time RealNetworks has made waves in the industry, their Chief Executive Rob Glaser has danced with Steve Jobs and Microsoft, so taking on all of Hollywood would seem like the natural next move.

The Tuesday the product launched and the lawsuit was filed Glaser wrote “great products should not be bullied out of the market by people trying to misuse the law to suppress legitimate innovation.” So, what exactly does the law say? Well, for starters just pop in any DVD you have lying about and you’ll find out a pretty good interpretation:

DVD FBI Warning

“The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a find o $250,000.”

This isn’t a case where you have to capitalize on the copied product by selling a copy. The warning is clear, ANY unauthorized reproduction is illegal. Having “users [be] on the honor system” to not rent a movie from Blockbuster or Netflix, burn the DVD, and return it isn’t enough for Hollywood. While Glaser might consider there to be an alternative interpretation of that warning from the FBI, ‘The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998‘ tends to put any doubts to rest. While this product will certainly grab the attention of the film industry it could potentially set a precedent going forward as a way to clarify the law. Depending on the outcome it could either lead to RealNetworks stepping out of their recent slump within the industry or it could see them with a takeover offer to make this problem go away.

I for one hope the precedent is perfectly clear. The more ambiguous the law is in regards to digital copyright issues the harder it is to create solid foundations for future capitalist success. I fully support the film studios in this totally legitimate claim against RealNetworks. I’m tired of being the only person I know not willing to use BitTorrent, or something else to illegally download movies, music and computer software. While my friends and peers continue to take advantage of the film/music industry with no penalties I still harbor some sense of moral indignation for such actions. I don’t steal my music or my movies. In fact it pisses me off when people do. I’m obviously a huge supporter of future technologies and ways to provide content to consumers in easily accessible ways. There is no denying that big changes are coming to the music and film industry over the next 5-10 years. However, copying rented movies to personal hard drives is, to me, a clear violation of the laws as they stand now. As with most copyright laws I’ll be watching how this one plays out, they tend to be game-changers depending on the outcomes.

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Not one to pass up an internet novelty that will disappear out of consciousness in about a week. I offer to you www.yearbookyourself.com. Upload any photo of yourself, or friends, and then let the fun begin. Your picture will be placed into a cutout of a stereotype of that year dating back to the 50s. You can save and share your creations, and quite frankly weird out coworkers with 90% of the pictures you create. Watch out for the subtle use of ads on the page. When you are looking at 1984 and it says “Apple”, “Diesel”, and “Puma” on the side, those aren’t funny overlays you can add to the photo, those are well done ads.

Take for example the me of 1952:

A little David Schwimmer action going on for me.

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Chrome freakin’ rocks.  At least that’s my first impression so far.  

After a relatively quick download and install from the Chrome Beta site, I was up and running last night with Google’s new browser.

What I was instantly blown away by was how snappy the browser was.  From loading the browser in the first place, to opening new tabs, to opening heavy pages on the Internet, Chrome just seems zippy.  Forget that…it doesn’t seem zippier, it is.  Especially on JavaScript and media heavy sites.

 One of the first thoughts I had when I started using the browser was, “Ohh, so this is what Web 2.0 is supposed to be like.”  No long waits for bloated websites to sluggishly try and render in IE.  Remember back in the day when you first experienced the web over a true high-speed Internet connection?  It’s like that again.

My companies website, which I know is very JavaScript heavy, loads much, much faster in Chrome.  Gmail seems to open almost instantly.  I’m reminded of arriving at the University of Washington and downloading MP3s via Napster–often the download would be done before the % complete bar would even display.  That’s the feeling I get surfing with Chrome.  

The UI is very minimal.  Or at least it feels that way.  Perhaps it takes up just as much toolbar space as IE 6 and 7, but it doesn’t feel that way.  The integrated address/search/everything bar is pretty slick as well…just start typing what you want.  The bar is smart enough to know if you’re searching or looking for a website in your history.  Furthermore, Google’s top-search suggestions are displayed when it recognizes you’re typing a search.  And the intelligent filtering seems to be a lot smoother than the jarring redraws you see with Firefox 3.

The new tab window seems just…smart.  Why wasn’t this done before?  When you open a new tab, Google displays thumbnails of your most-frequently (or most-recently?  I’m not sure yet…) sites, so with a simple click you can navigate to your favorite locations.  If you think about it, you’re really often only going to a handful of sites each day, and now those will be easily accessible.

I haven’t checked, but I assume that Google has provided me a way to access these sites without having to pick up my hands from the keyboard and use the mouse.  I need to explore what kind of keyboard shortcuts Chrome offers.  The keyboard shortcuts are one of the reasons I find Gmail so easy to use–I am constantly frustrated when Outlook doesn’t understand “g-i” means I want to go back to my Inbox.  Bah!

Now, Minyanville ran a story regarding IE 8’s new “porn mode”–aka private browsing or what MS refers to as “InPrivate.”  This feature is not new to the browsing world, with Firefox, Safari, and Camino all having had similar features for quite some time.  Minyanville, referencing a Financial Times article, insinuated that this would somehow take a hit out of Google’s search engine revenue.  Because of course all those people out there in Teh Internets are constantly being mindful of their browsing behavior and the kind of data that Google is collecting–and thusly they’ll always browse “InPrivate”–cutting off some valuable data for Google’s search algorithms.

I dont’ think this really going to be an issue however.  Firstly, even if you’re browsing “InPrivate” and you make a search via Google, Google’s obviously going to have your search term, and can still target ads.  Furthermore, Google built in an “Incognito” mode into Chrome.  And they did some interesting things with it.  Their implementation is not all-or-nothing.  You can start a new window in “Incognito” mode, or you can right click a link and open the link in a new window that way.  The mode is denoted by a rather incognito looking dude in the top of the window and a different colored frame than the default browser.  The mode will not keep a history, and will automagically delete all associated browsing data, including cookies, when the tab/window is closed–not just when you restart the browser.  So you can surf half your windows privately while keeping the other windows in a normal mode.  Buying a surprise gift?  Surfing hot trample porn?  Sweet!  No need to clear your entire browsing history and leave a telltale indication to anyone who is snooping you history.

And to end my first impressions of Chrome, while I have to say the browser feels faster and snappier overall, it does appear to use more memory than Firefox.  Google claimed that because of the sandboxing of each window and tab–each run as a separate process, allowing a crashed tab to not bring down the entire browser or OS–there is a larger memory overhead to being with.  But as they’ve revamped a lot of the garbage collection in the code, over time the overhead will pay off because other browsers will get bloated and not reallocate unused memory.  In initial testing, I opened the same windows in Chrome and Firefox 3, and got about 100MB in memory usage out of Chrome (across all Chrome processes) compared to only about 63MB of usage in Firefox.  What I haven’t had a chance to do yet is run both FF and Chrome all day, and find out which is more bloated after a whole day’s usage (I doubt my Windows box will get through the whole day without some other issue or update causing a reboot, so this test might best be left to someone else). 

In all, Chrome rocks.  Download it, use it, love it.  At least for now.  And at least until IE 8 comes along and you’re forced to use it to log into some arcane corporate intranet tool.  Damn those IE-only sites…

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Sad Mac

For years, Mac users have had the love/hate relationship with the adorable Sad Mac icon.  It’s cute.  But it usually sucks when you see it.

Despite being a generally bad omen when you see it, there’s quite a culture which has grown up around the iconic icon.  And it sure is a lot nicer to look at than the standard Windows Blue Screen of Death.

With the introduction of Google Chrome however, the Sad Mac will finally have some company in the form of Sad Tab.

Sad Tab will appear whenever a tab is corrupted in the browser.  Chrome threads each tab as a separate process, so if one tab fails it won’t bring down the whole window or the entire browser (actually, each tab is technically its own browser).  The good news is that Sad Tab shouldn’t cause you to schedule a trip to your local Genius Bar.

Sad Tab

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I forgot to mention it earlier this week but TheWB.com went live. Maybe because the site is so poorly designed and has such a wasted use of quality content that enables me from writing my review of the site. I’ve got a few drafts I’ve written up and I even sent a letter to Brent with “The WB Team” that would make for a good review, but the site is so poor that I can’t get excited about it enough one way or another to post much more than this.

If you want to you can go check it out for yourself now. I have the feeling you’ll soon find yourself disapointed and back at hulu watching episodes of ‘30 Rock’ starring that lady one post down, not that lady, the other one.

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NBC/Universal might have shelled out $900mil for exclusive U.S. coverage of the Beijing games but it looks like they might have made their monies worth. The company says they raked in more than $1bil in ad sales for the games. While that $100mil might be what ‘The Dark Knight’ made in its first 12 hours it’s still enough to make almost every aspect of the games a great success.

One failing point however came from online ad revenue which accounted for only $5.75mil of the total. According to NBC the games official website NBCOlympics.com was a “research laboratory” to see how users consumed the product via the internet. It might be clear from their findings that when venturing into the digital world of the internet you need to be as fast as Michael Phelps on the home stretch. I’ve said it time and time again, people view televised events on their computer for one of 3 reasons: #1 They missed the show they wanted or are otherwise unavailable when it airs, #2 They want to re-watch the show, and #3 They want to be the first to see the live event not being showed on their TV for another 12 hours.

Maybe another Direct TV spot would have brought in more cash $.

NBC made the decision in many cases to delay many of the events event online. This is a large part as to why Yahoo!, who streamed live events, received 4.7 million unique visitors a day versus 4.3 million for NBC.  That would have more than doubled their total, and probably their revenue.

Those on ‘Avenue Q’might say “the internet is for porn” but it’s more than just that. It’s for having everything you want at the type of your fingertips. If that happens to be porn then fine, but people can watch tv for regularly scheduled programming, you go to the web to search, discover, and find out the latest and greatest.

With this weeks Democratic National Convention the networks are presented with another time zone issue. After last nights opening day it’s clear the broadcast networks just don’t get it. More and more people will turn to cable news and to the internet to receive their content if it means having it live-as-it-happens and not live on the East coast but actually 3 hours past live for the people on the West coast.  As Yahoo! proved during the Olympics, if you want to increase traffic you don’t hold on to the news until it’s more convenient for you. The internet and it’s billions of users wait for nothing.

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Canadian’s often feel overshadowed by American media. I mean, aside from Bryan Adams and Alanis Morissette, Canadian pop stars are fewer and farther between than their American counterparts.

But now Reuters reports that Canadian’s who have been rubbed wrong by the lack of Canadian generated porn, and their boredom with American porn, can anxiously await the launch of the Northern Peaks adult pay-TV channel. It will be “Canada’s first adult video channel offering significant Canadian adult content.” Canadian regulators just approved the channel.

What’s more significant is that while Canadian regulators require 15 percent of content to be Canadian-generated on channels, Norther Peaks is going to have no less than 50 percent of Canadian-generated content. This will likely spur a large number of auditions to star in new channel content–and of course a large collection of “auditions” and “outtakes” for later use on the channel or direct-to-DVD production.

Most interesting is this though:

“Northern Peaks will be restricted to certain types of programming including long-form documentaries, dramatic series, feature films, game shows, mini-series, sitcoms and made-for-TV movies.”

So, let’s just think of this for a few minutes…adult pay channel content in the form of:

• Long-form documentaries (a. “long-form” hahah b. “documentaries”??)
• Dramatic series (aka porn with too much dialog)
• Game shows (what are the prizes??)
• Mini-series, sitcoms, etc (can we see a new take on “Twin Peaks”??)

Sorry if that was a bit immature, but I couldn’t resist. Here is an interesting hook however: a featured Xtube [NSFW] users amateur hour show. Xtube is a Canadian-based company, so this completely makes sense and would make for great cross promotion.

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Possibly and Internet first–fans turned to the Web in order to purchase Dark Knight tickets off of sites such as eBay and Craigslist.  Usually fans turn to the web in order to buy hard-to-get tickets for music concerts and other events, but with fans lining up more frequently for big-name movies, scalpers may have to add movies to their list of items for sale online.

I did a quick check on the Seattle’s Craigslist pages, and it seems like most fans in Seattle were either able to get their hands on tickets through traditional sales channels, or were uninterested in giving them up.  I’ll be pretty upset if I start having to pay $20 to buy tickets from people who go and buy massive quantities…

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CNN has a pretty exhaustive review of the 3G iPhone.  They essentially cover every aspect of the design and all the features of the phone, including what is new, what is improved, etc. etc.  The general verdict from the review:

 So should you buy an iPhone 3G? If you haven’t bought an iPhone yet, and have been holding out for a new model, now is the time. If you’re a current iPhone owner and you’re yearning for a faster cellular network, then you should take the plunge.But if you’re an iPhone owner who won’t use 3G (or can’t; check your coverage at AT&T), then you should stick with your current model. The iPhone 2.0 software update provides Exchange server support, third-party apps support, and many new features without the added cost

Some other take-aways and comments from the article:

• The 3G version weighs ever so slightly less than the original
• The screen is the same size but has a few more dots per inch (163 vs 160)
• CNN says the white is not their “cup of tea”–but I think it’s the one I’m going to get.
• As Uncle Steve mentioned in the 3G announcement, the headphone jack is now flush–no more stupid adapters to buy.  However, I had heard there was a color-changing ring which would indicate if the phone had been submerged in water which surrounded the headphone jack–is that still there??
• A SIM removal tool is included in the box!
• A dock is not!! BOOOO.  $30 for a dock?  That sucks.
• Exchange Server support built-in.  But according to the AT&T reps I’ve spoken with, that’ll cost you $15 more for an “Enterprise Data Plan” in order to enable Exchange syncing.  I’d like to see if this is truly the case.
• CNN dogs on the ability to only sync with one Exchange server…but I’m pretty sure my Windows Mobile 6 device can only sync with one Exchange server.  But, you can use third-party tools such as Plaxo to keep multiple accounts and programs in sync (I sync my Outlook on my PC and my iCal/Address Book, etc. on my Mac in sync this way).
• The iTunes Wi-Fi store sadly only works over Wi-Fi–you can’t use the 3G connection to buy songs.
• Still no Flash.
• Parental controls–seriously?  Gah…if you don’t trust your kids enough or are that worried, don’t buy them a damn iPhone.  Your 12-year old doesn’t need one.  They need whatever free model you can get from your carrier which allows them to call, and if necessary, text.  When I worked at the Apple Store, I can’t tell you how often irate parents would come in and moan about the price of various iPods that their kids HAD to have, and how many folks came in and became belligerent when they found that their son/daughter smashing an iPod in the door of the car was NOT covered under warranty repair.
• Still no: multimedia messaging and video recording–but perhaps a 3rd Party app can fix this??
• Interestingly, you apparently can’t email a calendar appointment, or transfer files–you have to email them.  Does the iPhone not have a disk-mode like my iPods?

All in all, a very favorable review from CNN.  That being said, there are still some things missing from the phone, though Apple could probably fix a lot of them with future software patches.  I’ll certainly be buying one soon, and ditching my clunky AT&T 8525.  What’s the point of having a slide-out keyboard if it doesn’t work half the time?  And why pay for Opera Mobile 8.65 in order to get a “usable” browsing experience on WinMo, when you get (at least from my tests) a hands-down richer experience with the iPhone’s built-in Safari browser?  Although I will be giving up the ability to take awful, grainy, over- or under-exposed video clips.  Ohh well.

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