To Bing or not to Bing?
Focusing on Microsoft's dilemma over how it can compete against Google in a market that Google now solidly owns, blinds one to the bigger problem facing anyone trying to do business on the Internet today, including Microsoft: No one really has a clue as to how the damned thing works.
Arguably, Google may be closer to discovering the clue than anyone. But its clever marketing tactics, which lead the technology press to cover color changes to the Gmail toolbar and the shifting of department names from the bottom to the right side of the corporate logo as strike-up-the-band events, indicate to me that Google is just as indecisive about a viable long-term business plan as everyone else. It's just better at masking that fact.
The legacy of Khan: Star Trek's first collision course with the mainstream
My best friend Jeff saved me a copy, because he knew I'd not only want to see it but dissect it, the way a hungry crow goes after a freshly slammed armadillo in the middle of I-35. I was a Star Trek fan the way a New Yorker is a fan of John McEnroe or an Oklahoman is a fan of the Dallas Cowboys, loving to see them in the spotlight but always critiquing their style. Jeff was the assistant manager of a movie theater with four (four!) screens, so he got the advance promotional kit for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and Jeff saved me the first promo poster with stills from the movie. Between the premiere and my high school graduation, the premiere was -- at least at the time -- the more exciting event.
I can't think of Star Trek movies today without picturing the gang of us seated around the linoleum tables at Big Ed's, chomping down a heap of fresh-cut fries and taking apart the pictures from the promotional kit for clues. What was the meaning, for example, of Uhura's and Chekov's sweater collars being blue-gray, while Sulu's and Scotty's were mustard yellow?
Kindle 2 and the unintentional acquisition of knowledge
Amazon's Kindle 2 has received a great deal of acclaim for improving upon many of the shortcomings of its predecessor: shrinking its size, improving its usability, and adding a handful of new features such as rudimentary web browsing and the contentious text to speech function.
What's difficult to quantify is the effect it has on the user; that is, the degree to which it simplifies or improves one's life. Since I've had mine, my reading has gone from two books a month to eight, but because the majority of the books I read would best be classified as "light reading," I feel like the impact it has had on my personal improvement is negligible.
YouTube, Susan Boyle, and a slap at snark
The YouTube Symphony Orchestra gathered last night at Carnegie Hall to play an original Tan Dun piece composed specifically for the global competition that brought the group together. It's lovely. But I'm willing to bet that instead you were listening to a heretofore obscure singer absolutely flatten a roomful of doubters with a show tune.
Like a lot of us, I've been watching the Susan Boyle video repeatedly this week, trying to get at what it means for the Internet to have taken to heart, as the Britain's Got Talent audience took to heart, a middle-aged Scotswoman with ungroomed eyebrows and a frumpy Best Dress and a voice that seems to have broken something that needed breaking in hearts around the world.
Analyst Roger Kay takes a cue from the NAB, with the 'Mac Tax'
It should be no surprise, especially to long-time Mac users, that noted analyst Roger L. Kay, currently with Endpoint Technologies, is a supporter of the Windows "ecosystem." His opinions with regard to Windows are very much on the record, and he and I have often joined together with our colleagues, in brisk, lively, but fair discussions about the relative value of software and hardware on different platforms.
So frankly, Kay's latest white paper (PDF available here) which is a cost examination for home users planning complete at-home networks on Windows vs. Mac platforms (which Microsoft admits to having sponsored), comes to conclusions which should be no surprise to anyone on two fronts: First, Kay illustrates how much more individuals are likely to pay for Apple versus brand-name equipment from suppliers such as Dell and HP. Second, Kay takes Apple to task for charging a premium, and that he's done so isn't news either.
The news doesn't want to be free
Last week, Richard Engel, the long-time war correspondent currently with NBC News, won a much-deserved Peabody Award for his on-the-scene coverage of the war in Afghanistan. Every time I see the footage, I still get goose bumps. Here is a man crouching down in the corner of hilltop outpost, along with American soldiers from Viper Company firing in two directions into the mountains. From the camera angle peering up, you can actually see enemy ammunition passing mere inches from Engel's helmet and whispering through the flimsy camouflage. And like a weatherman covering converging air masses, Engel presents essentially a dissertation about the strategy of both the Taliban and al-Qaeda, some of which are shooting at him, at that moment.
After merely visualizing that footage for a few seconds, I find it pretty much impossible to count myself in the same column with Engel, under the title, "Journalist." There have been times when I'm covering a technology or a development conference, and a press relations specialist is rushing to validate a quote and refresh my grapefruit juice, when I would emphatically deny that Engel and I in the same business.
Thanks for the DSi, GameStop, and sorry for contributing to your irrelevance
I've been to more than a dozen midnight video game product launches now, and I still get taken aback by how upbeat GameStop's employees are when doing such a launch. But at last night's launch of Nintendo's DSi, I couldn't help but feel sad.
I showed up at my local store hoping to buy two DSis, but without any real expectations of leaving fulfilled as I hadn't pre-ordered Nintendo's newest portable. That's generally the reason why these midnight launches take place: to give the pre-order customers an 8-hour jump on general product availability for being supporters of GameStop.
AT&T Terms of Service changed, then unchanged for third-party video
Like a cheap tent or a clamshell phone, AT&T has folded on a Terms of Service change made earlier this week that would have prohibited prohibits "customer initiated redirection of television or other video or audio signals via any technology from a fixed location to a mobile device," lumping such streams in with peer-to-peer movie downloads and videocasting.
That language seemed to be directed most closely to Sling, which redirects signals from your television (programs, DVR recordings, digital radio) to another net-enabled recipient -- in the case of the cusp-of-release SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone, to the popular Apple handset.
Caller-ID on TV? No thanks, Sprint, I'm annoyed enough
According to Sprint, its new caller-ID notification service announced today can be personalized just like caller-ID on mobile phones themselves, including pictures, nicknames, custom fonts, and colors for different callers. Even before the phone rings, the company says, a caller-ID message pops up on the user's TV or PC screen.
Betanews contacted Sprint today, but since CTIA WIreless is this week, the reply channel for telecommunications companies has been slow. Our main question, after, "Is this an April Fool's gag?" was "How do you ignore calls?"
Will patent reform diminish or restore the value of originality?
The era of the digital machine in human history -- an era which has only spanned the interval of our own lifetimes, if that long -- has seen the difference between a concept and a mechanism narrowed to a barely negligible dividing line. For a concept to be patentable, it need not yet physically exist, yet it must be sufficiently demonstrable -- that is to say, the concept must be so meticulous as to describe something which could, if only for need of a little workmanship, be made real. The legal phrase for this is reduction to practice -- a demonstration of the workability of the concept, which can in most cases (one notable exception being genes) be simply theoretical.
What so few individuals understand about the ideal of the patent is that it is principally an instrument with which you as an individual may attest that a workable concept is yours. It does not calculate a concept's commercial value or practicality or efficiency or usefulness; rather, that as an ideal of a mechanism, it specifies that it is original, that it came from someone in particular, and that it is workable. Ideally, a concept should be attributable to its source, just as this paragraph and this essay will, for whatever it's worth, be attributed to me.
Sun's Jonathan Schwartz takes up the fireside chat habit
Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO and president, has taken up videoblogging. Like FDR before him he's seized the airwaves to dispense wisdom in the face of economic uproar. Of course, he does kicks it off with "joining the chorus of those worried about the global economy," but since when do they do things the easy way over at Sun?
The inaugural video, slated to be the first of four, lays out Sun's strategy for pressing forth with open source as a strategy, philosophy, and business advantage. He's quite confident of getting the company, which has $3 billion in cash, though these days: "I'm not worried about the future; I'm focused on its arrival date."
FISMA, CAG, and the Department of Redundancy Department
There's a plaintive subhead in the draft of the Consensus Audit Guidelines (CAG) that sums up how the writers of the document must feel about their work to improve governmental IT security. It's right there on page 3: "Why this project is so important: Gaining agreement among CISOs, CIOs and IGs." See? pleads the subtext See, information security offices and information officers and federal inspectors general? You can't possibly ignore this very important information if we address you by your title... can you?
Oh, but they can. This is, after all, information security, where people regularly spend more energy circumventing a system than following it. The guidelines are a mighty attempt to ease government and private-sector organizations into embracing good security controls. It remains to be seen if this time will finally prove the charm.
No kudos yet for Microsoft's Kumo
The word which perhaps best characterizes the screenshots, leaked today to The Wall Street Journal's Kara Swisher, of Microsoft's internal tests of a search service tentatively entitled "Kumo," is unremarkable. They show a remade version of Windows Live Search with a few new innovations -- new for Microsoft, that is -- but at least based on these samples alone, not enough to clearly demonstrate why anyone should use Kumo instead of Google or Yahoo.
The screenshots display search results for three typical types of popular searches. These results are displayed on a page with a categorical navigation bar along the left side, offering ways in which the service can display different types of results (in Windows Live Search, these categories might appear in a line along the top marked See also). Unlike in Live.com, however, results can appear automatically grouped into Yellow Pages-like categories; for example, a search for "Audi S8" returned a list which was subcategorized into "Parts," "Accessories," "Forum," and other groupings with related terms.
Can't we just settle on 'netbook' already?
No matter how inaccurate or stigmatized the term, "netbook" has become the de facto name for those small PCs we see people toting around everywhere. Now could someone please tell that to the companies making them?
This week, mobile processor company VIA introduced a lifestyle site dedicated to the netbook phenomenon called How To Be Mobile, (or "H2BM" if you're filling out a personal ad.) Even here, however, the devices are interchangeably referred to as "Mini-notes, sub-notebooks, and ultraportable laptops," tiptoeing around "netbook."
Here's a get-well-soon gift idea: An Apple board with a grip
There exists a man named Steve Jobs. If we were to tell his life story, it would include his parentage of diverse companies. Some grew up smart and strong (Pixar). Some struggled through brief lives but live on in memory (NeXT). And then there's Apple -- the immature brat that refuses to move out of the house and do its own damn laundry.
Seriously, Apple board members, what have you been thinking all these years, that you spend your time during Jobs' six-month medical leave whining like a two-year-old about when Daddy's coming home and acting shifty when someone rings the doorbell? How did you let yourself get into a situation where corporate-governance folks want to string you up for not giving up even more information about what should by rights be a private and peaceful time in Jobs' life?
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