Month: July 2006

Coming Zune from Microsoft

Post ImageTurns out the rumor is true! Microsoft is working on a new project to take on Apple and the iPod called Zune. Information is flying fast and furious around the web, but Engadget has come to the rescue with a pretty good status check of what is known thus far. They also posted a quote from Microsoft’s GM of Marketing, Chris Stephenson:

“Today we confirmed a new music and entertainment project called Zune. Under the Zune brand, we will deliver a family of hardware and software products, the first of which will be available this year. We see a great opportunity to bring together technology and community to allow consumers to explore and discover music together.”

From the CNET News.com article on Zune, I found the teaser website which is pretty unimpressive, though it does give you the ability to sign up for news and updates.

As has been noted elsewhere, this marks a significant change in Microsoft’s media and entertainment strategy, which thus far has relied upon partners to build and sell devices. I don’t think it will be quite the problem that many believe though – Microsoft competes with partners all the time, in a wide range of different industries. In fact I hope Zune turns out to be great, so Microsoft’s partners can follow their lead and improve their own players.

With keyboards, mice, webcams, the Xbox 360, and probably other stuff I don’t know about, Microsoft’s hardware business is already somewhat substantial. Add media players to the mix, the rumored portable gaming device, and maybe Microsoft sees a future in hardware? I wonder how long it will be until they manufacture their own Media Center PC.

In any case, bring on the Zune!

Read: Engadget

Does the Bush Veto matter?

Post ImageAs you have probably heard by now, US President Bush made the first veto of his presidency yesterday, rejecting legislation that would have expanded federal support for embryonic stem cell research. While I applaud his ability to make a decision and stick to it (something he has done throughout the last six years, for better or for worse) I think that his veto was a little short-sighted. The issue is a touchy one, no doubt, but there is lots of support for such research.

And if I understand things correctly, ignoring the political drama the veto has and will continue to create, it doesn’t really matter anyway. The result of Bush’s decision is that federal funding for such research will not happen any time soon, but that doesn’t prevent private research from taking place. Do some reading on the subject, and you’ll find that medical research is starting to undergo something of a revolution – from taking place only in huge labs and Universities to taking place almost everywhere thanks to recent technology advances, falling costs, and “open source” type methodologies. I think we’ll start to see more and more research happen in the unlikliest of places, without any need for federal funding.

That’s why I think the Bush veto doesn’t matter in the long run.

Read: NYTimes.com

All the good domain names are gone!

Post ImageI came across a really fascinating article yesterday about Dennis Forbes, who has been studying a huge list of domain names in his spare time, making him something of a domainologist. Some of the things Mr. Forbes has found by looking at the list (which he got from someone at VeriSign) are truly amazing:

All of the 1,000 most common English words have been snatched up. The word “a” appears more than any other, though most of the time, of course, it’s just a letter in a longer word. The least-used common word is “consonant,” Mr. Forbes says, which is in just 42 domains, including “consonantpain.com,” which isn’t a misspelling but a word game.

Mr. Forbes checked the U.S. Census Bureau’s 1,219 most-common male names, the 2,841 most-common female names and the 10,000 most-common surnames; all were booked. Not only that, but when you link the top 300 first names with the top 300 last names, 89 percent of the resulting combinations are taken for male names and 84 percent for female ones.

And more generally?

For example, for every possible two-character and three-character combination, including both letters and numbers _ all possible domains are taken. Virtually all English words with four letters are claimed; those that aren’t are usually contractions, and Web rules don’t allow apostrophes.

Half of all domains are between nine and 15 characters long; the average length is 13. A domain can have, at most, 63 characters, and there are 550 such domains. In fact, some people have made a haiku-like art out of 63-character domain names.

Told you it was interesting! I’ve been known to buy domains on a whim, but there are people who have turned it into a multi-million dollar business. Digital real-estate is valuable as well it seems!

Read: NFD News

MoveDigital

Post ImageI had been looking at a service called Prodigem a couple weeks ago, but they informed me they would soon be relaunching. Well, now they have, and with a bang too! Prodigem was acquired by MoveDigital, and the new service they have launched is pretty sweet:

We’re unique, a file is only charged as delivered after the entire direct download is complete.

We also allow your audience to add bandwidth to your account, and we always roll over your bandwidth, so it’s never lost.

A free account will give you 30 days of use, 1 GB of storage space, and 10 GB of bandwidth. Paid accounts start at just $10 for an entire year. On top of that, they can create torrents for your files, and if you upload audio or video, they will even make it streamable for mobile phones.

I played around with the service a little today, and it works great. They show you download statistics for your files (but only if the entire file is downloaded). They even count a proper download for BitTorrent (though, presumably, only for files they seed). Users can also subscribe to your content using the RSS feeds that MoveDigital automatically generates, one for direct downloads, one for torrent downloads, and one for mobile streams.

Overall, it’s a pretty nicely done service. I have only two complaints really, one being that the link to their API does not work! The second is the price is pretty high. Even their Premium account (the highest one), which costs $10,100 for the entire year, is 5 times more expensive than comparable benefits (storage, bandwidth) using Amazon S3. The cost per additional GB of transfer is also 19 cents higher than Amazon S3 (and five times higher if you’re on the Basic plan).

I suppose if you had a high number of partial downloads it would even out, but you’d need a lot of those for it to work. Also note that MoveDigital does charge for partial downloads of data using BitTorrent or the mobile streams, only direct downloads can take advantage of the entire download charge feature.

Read: MoveDigital

Immortalized in Firefox 2

Post ImageAs you might have heard, Firefox recently released a beta of the next version of their browser, code-named Bon Echo. Interestingly enough, they have also announced a program that would let you get your name right in the source code:

To commemorate the three-year anniversary of the creation of the Mozilla Foundation on July 15, the open-source group announced that if a Firefox user persuades a friend to download the browser, both the user and the friend’s names will be added to the source code of the next version of the browser, Firefox 2.0.

It’s an interesting marketing experiment, I’ll give them that much. Read that article, and then read Jeremy Wright’s post titled Firefox Copying IE. What Jeremy has to say is dead on, Firefox 2 probably isn’t worthy of a complete 2.0 release. I’ve been critical of Firefox on this blog and elsewhere recently, and this only adds to my feelings. Perhaps the Firefox team should be focusing on creating an incredible next version rather than one full of people’s names.

Read: CNET News.com

Odeo giving up on podcasting?

Post ImageMaybe it’s time everyone stopped calling Odeo a podcasting company. I’ve been critical of Google’s apparent lack of focus and direction many times in the past, but they’ve got nothing on Odeo. I mean here’s a company with some very smart people working for them, some substantial venture capital behind them, and yet very little to show for it. Perhaps the last notable thing Odeo did with regards to the core offering was redesign the website – and that was in December 2005. I have to agree with what Alex Williams said – “These dudes must have some pretty mellow investors.”

That’s not to say they are standing still. Odeo recently launched two new products, Hellodeo and Twttr. The former is somewhat related to podcasting, while the latter appears to have absolutely no connection whatsoever. Hellodeo lets you record a video message from your webcam to embed on other websites, and Twttr allows you to stay up to date with your friends using text messaging. Notice a trend? Yep, moving further and further away from podcasting.

I think it’s fair to say that LibSyn has done far more in terms of getting people into podcasting than Odeo has, and somehow I doubt that Evan Williams and crew have any tricks up their sleeve. Odeo, quite simply, seems lost. It’s a shame too, because they had the opportunity to do something great with podcasting. Maybe they should just purchase LibSyn?

You might recall that in May of last year, Fortune magazine named Odeo one of their 25 Breakout Companies for 2005. I wonder what they would say about the company today? I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t make the list again.

Maybe Odeo will come out with something amazing and I’ll be forced to eat my words, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. I do however, think Odeo would be wise to read Dead 2.0 Skeptic’s 11 Suggestions for Not Being a Dot-Bomb 2.0.

Intel Keifer: 32 Cores

Post ImageBack in January I sort of predicted that by 2007, a common question won’t be how fast your processor is, but how many cores it has. I think my prediction is starting to look more and more like a reality. I don’t think I wrote about it, but we purchased new machines for the office a while ago, and they each have dual core processors. This last week saw the official launch of Intel’s new Core 2 Duo chips, and as the name suggests, they have more than one core.

But if you think two cores is good, wait another three to four years:

I have to say I can’t remember performance gains anywhere near 16x in only four years. Comparing a 2002 Pentium 4 3.06 GHz with a Core 2 Extreme 2.93 GHz will give you a two to five fold increase – if most. 16x more performance by 32 cores in 2010 versus today’s two cores, should it come true, equals linear scaling, which means that performance would double with the core count. Many of you will say this is utterly impossible, because even sustaining the clock speed levels at doubled core count might be difficult – and I agree, unless you start to think out of the box.

Yep it seems Intel is working on having 32 cores on a chip by 2010, a project code-named “Keifer”. According to some sources, each core would run at 2 GHz, which is slower than today’s fastest chips, but adds up when there’s 32 of them. No word on how much power this beast might devour.

Now 2010 is still a ways off, and Intel has been known to change course in the past, but if they get this project completed according to plan, the future for computing performance looks very bright indeed. That and AMD is going to have some catching up to do.

Read: Tom’s Hardware

Notes for 7/16/2006

I’ve been programming lots, which is why I haven’t posted as much as usual. Here are my weekly notes:

  • Here’s a really great video I came across from the Inside CBC blog. It’s the first news report CBC TV did about the Internet, back in 1993. I think it’s funny how they refer to it as “Internet” and not “the Internet”.
  • Went to Delux Burger Bar tonight, and had the grilled cheese. There portion was quite small, though there were lots of fries in these interesting little shopping carts (instead of say, a plate). The scenery is great, and they give you cotton candy with your bill!
  • Addicted to video games? You might want to visit the new rehab center in Amsterdam.
  • Mark Evans linked to the Canadian Tech Mob (basically a webring), which is an effort to show that “Canada kicks ass in tech and innovation.” I thought it was cool until I saw the website. No showing off tech and innovation here. Admirable idea, but seriously, the website looks like it was made in 1995.
  • YouTube serves over 100 million videos a day now. Staggering isn’t it?
  • Went to see Pirates 2 last night, and while it was an enjoyable movie, it is a complete setup for part 3. There’s lots of great action and stuff in this one, don’t get me wrong, but you’re left with that sense of “damn, now I have to wait a year.”
  • As you may have heard, Intel unveiled their new Core 2 Duo processors this past week. By all accounts, the new chips look amazing! And as an Intel nut, I am glad they have reclaimed the lead from AMD.

REVIEW: An Inconvenient Truth

Post ImageSharon and I went to see Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth a few days ago at the Garneau. I thought the film was very well done, and unlike Sharon, I didn’t think it was too long. Gore is an incredibly engaging speaker, and he does a super job of getting his point across. I do have a few issues with the film though:

  • This is a very one-sided story. Which is okay, as long as you make the effort to find out about the other side.
  • Gore uses lots of numbered lists in the movie, which gets confusing after a while. Lists such as, “three reasons for this” and “four causes for this” and on and on.
  • A picture really is worth a thousand words, but I found myself wanting to know more about the flashy graphs Gore kept showing. I mean you could take them at face value, but how responsible would that be?
  • His self-introduction as “the former next president of the United States” is funny, but I have heard it a few times now, so it has lost that special ring.

If you want a good argument for “the other side”, I would suggest reading some of Michael Crichton’s work. He’s written some great stuff, such as:

Kill the wolves, and save the elk. Move the grizzlies, and avoid the lawyers. And on, and on. Its this simplistic, cause-and-effect thinking that must go.

And for that matter, who believes that the complex system of our atmosphere behaves in such a simple and predictable way that if we reduce one component, carbon dioxide, we will therefore reliably reduce temperature? CO2 is not like an accelerator on a car. Its not linear (and by the way, neither is a car accelerator.) And furthermore, who believes that the climate can be stabilized when it has never been stable throughout the earths history? We can only entertain such an idea if we dont really understand what a complex system is. Were like the blonde who returned the scarf because it was too tight. We dont get it.

I like that excerpt, because most of An Inconvenient Truth is focused on explaining how CO2 causes temperatures to rise.

There are some great non-climate-crisis gems in the movie. At the beginning, Gore shows some images of the earth, and explains how they were taken from space, and that one of them is the most commonly published photo in history. Fascinating stuff.

As a skeptic not of the earth’s temperature rising at the moment but of global warming, I didn’t leave the theatre preaching Gore’s gospel. I do think his movie is the best argument for global warming that I have seen though.

Interestingly, Sharon and I both had the same reaction when leaving the theatre – “I wish he had been president.”

Frogger on Xbox 360

Post ImageOne of the things I like best about my Xbox 360 is the Xbox Live Arcade, and it’s about to get even better. Microsoft recently announced they will be releasing at least one new arcade-style game for the service every Wednesday:

At a trendy bar filled with gamers and video game press, Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled its lineup of retro hits like “Pac-Man,” “Galaga” and “Frogger” as part of its new Xbox Live Arcade Wednesdays program.

Players will need to connect their Xboxes to an Internet connection in order to download the games, though they don’t need to stay connected to play them.

The first game is Frogger, and it was released yesterday. I downloaded the trial last night to see what it was like – it’s kinda neat! They have “enhanced” and “classic” graphics for the game, which is pretty funny. While the arcade style games don’t utilize any of the real power the 360 has, they are fun for a change every now and then. The games will cost between $5 and $10.

I can’t wait for Pac-man!

Read: CNET News.com